Nullcraft Portal Development Kit

Nullcraft Portal Development Kit is a tool for Web developers to quickly and easily
integrate several heterogeneous applications and news sources together into a
multi-page portal layout. It takes advantage of a J2EE environment, yet still allows web
developers to develop and maintain CGI and other applications. The main display format
is
via a JSP page that uses JSP custom tag libraries to generate the dynamic layout. This
layout mechanism uses features from JSP 1.2 spec. The "native" development
environment
for backend modules will be Java 2 Servlet/JSP. J2EE security components will be made
available to all applications accessed via the Portal. News channels can be managed using
RDF (RSS) files. Configuration via XML files or JDBC connection will both be available
options. Each backend component type has it's own Plugin for configuration and
execution.

Recent releases

Release Notes: The most significant feature enhancement in this version is a new CGI plugin. This plugin supports GET requests in this version, but future versions will also support POST. A security bug where the user's credentials were not checked prior to performing several administrative tasks was fixed. More documentation was added. Whitespace in Module and Operation names is no longer allowed. A sample Perl CGI app (whois.bw.org) is included as an example of the CGI plugin. A URL mapping was added to allow for cleaner URLs such as Dispatch/foo/bar in addition to Dispatch?mod=foo&op=bar.

Release Notes: A collection of Web-based administration pages for configuring modules has been
added. Many concurrency issues were addressed. A role of 'admin' was
implemented and is now used by the system for managing Modules, their
Operations, and Components. Boolean/bit SQL types are no longer used for
specifying boolean values. Instead, smallint is used exclusively, using 1 or 0
to represent booleans, so as to accommodate various JDBC drivers.

Release Notes: This release fixes all PostgreSQL-specific issues. PortalUtils no longer relies on default values in the database. Fixed the issue where a user named '' could be created, so that now usernames and passwords must be at least 3 characters long. Various other features have been enhanced and/or altered.

Release Notes: This minor release fixes some PostgreSQL-specific issues related to unique Id gereration. PortalUtils.getNextId(..) is now database-independent, thus making the entire application database independent (haven't yet tested this, though). User management was changed a bit: the current logged in User count is alot more accurate now, only relying on the system garbage collector when a User's session expires, not when they explicitly log out or change users.